It’s been afloat for about 10 years. When the notion was first proposed in a gambit to get state tax subsidies, Ken Ham & Co. said it would bring in 1.6 million tourists in the first year, and that that number would go up by about 4% each following years, with occasional surges by 10% as new planned exhibits were opened. By those 2015 estimates, they should be bringing in 2.5 million visitors this year. Are they?
- Year 1(JY 2016-JE 2017): est. 800,000 (50% of projected attendance)
- Year 2 (JY 2017-JE 2018): 865,761 (52% of projected attendance)
- Year 3 (JY 2018-JE 2019): 875,882 (51% of projected attendance)
- Year 4 (JY 2019-JE 2021): 841,772 (44% of projected attendance)
Given the impact of COVID on Ark attendance, I left out March 2020-February 2021- Year 5 (JY 2021-JE 2022): 775,731 (39% of projected attendance)
- Year 6 (JY 2022-JE 2023): 782,660 (36% of projected attendance)
- Year 7 (JY 2023-JE 2024): 764,258 (34% of projected attendance)
- Year 8 (JY 2024-JE 2025): 682,101 (27% of projected attendance)
- Year 9 (JY 2025-JE 2026): 664, 813 (26% of projected attendance)
For May-June 2026 I used the attendance numbers from May-June 2025. If history is any guide, this may serve to overestimate Year 9 attendance.
They made the invalid assumption that, after the novelty had worn off in the first year, they would get sustained growth for some reason. I’ve been there. I feel no desire to repeat my visit, especially after the ridiculous parking and admission fees. There is nothing there in the big wooden box! Once you’ve read the numerous silly and static infographics pasted on the walls, what would be the point?
I am amused that they only got about half their projected numbers in the first year, and it’s been declining ever since. They’re probably not suffering much, though, since the costs to maintain a big empty wooden box are probably relatively low.
“The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
The ship is sinking
There’s a leak, there’s a leak in the boiler room
Who are the ones we put in charge
Killers, thieves and lawyers
God’s away
God’s away
God’s away on business”
I don’t imagine that their budget for labor amounts to very much. Other than a healtthy cut for Ham and a few of his cronies, most of the jobs are minimum wage, part time positions with few to no benefits. There probably a number of “volunteers” brought in from the surrounding churches who’ve been convinced that they’re do the lord’s work by giving free labor to such a godly endeavour.
Been seeing ads for this and a Creation Museum showing up on Twitch lately. Pretty pathetic.
Isn’t schadenfreude fun?
I’m not seeing an explanation of JY and JE in the date ranges.
It would have been cheaper to build a square box of reeds, as per the original mesopotamian specification.
I suppose they have no comments about the differences between the two Flood narratives in the Old Testament.
What is Twitch?
Never mind, I just looked it up on Google.
How does Twitch differ from TikTok or YouTube?
There looks like a huge amount of overlap between the three.
That doesn’t look like a forecasting failure, it looks like they’re deliberately lying.
myeck waters @5
I think it’s July and June.
Wait, I just looked at the original context, and it’s comparing to an early feasibility report. When I first looked at the numbers I thought the forecast was being updated year to year, but it’s not. I stand corrected.
@raven #7
Twitch has always been primarily game streaming focused. It’s branched out, but the majority of streamers there are doing games.
They should relocate the Ark to Miami, load it up with resentful Cuban exiles (y’know, the MAGA ones), and set sail for Cuba.
I hear he Bay of Pigs is beautiful, this time of year.
Paint a big “B” on the side, also, too. Will it make it there without sinking? (shrug emoji)
Attendance actually increased in year 2 and 3, but got no where near their projection. After that, it’s all downhill.
It’s ironic that they opened with the start of their beloved Christian nationalist president who tanked the economy in his firs term with the capper being COVID. COVID and Dumpster economics killed off lots of businesses. There was some recovery under Biden, but we’re right back to where we were in 2021.
I doubt they were counting on curious atheists to make up their numbers, but there are some 200 million nominal Christians in the US with millions more in neighboring countries. Surely they would come in increasing numbers. But, no.
Why aren’t they coming? The most obvious is that it’s expensive. That expense isn’t just admission and parking, but transportation and lodging. The “little town of Wiliamston” is basically the middle-of-no-where. You have to get there and find some place to stay.
Plus, there is nothing else to do. While it’s only an hours drive from Cincinnati, there’s probably not a lot of fun activities in Cincinnati to do with the kids. Imagine if the Ark Encounter were in the Orlando area of Florida rather than Kentucky. Of course, that would have been more expensive to build and harder to get the state to invest in scheme.
From what I’ve seen, the exhibits don’t invite repetitive visits…see it once is more than enough…even for devout Christians. They get home and spread the word to other parents in the church: it’s a lot of money to go for two hours max, and then there’s no where else to go except drive through the green hills of Kentucky looking at the trees. Boring!
Well, it’s not like they’ll ever have to deal with the expense of keeping the thing seaworthy…
The Netherlands is home to two Arks. The big one closed quite soon after it opened. But… someone thinks there is a market for this, whether in the Netherlands or somewhere else in Europe. No idea how he wants to get to other European countries, or even the Middle East (as his fancy leads him to say).
He’ll first have to buy the thing, for which he is fleecing the faithful far and wide.
Apparently there are many rotting planks in the wooden structure, that will have to be fixed – of course by volunteers, as paying professionals to fix it will be hugely expensive. Once fixed, the prospective new owner plans to open it to the public, for free.
At least he’s not asking any government, local or national, in our country to pay for it or give him huge tax breaks.
Article on the news site NOS.nl (in Dutch)
Dept. of bent priests.
“Hillsong Church Founder Brian Houston Posted Adult Content Again… and his excuse is, somebody hackad him”.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=c9xVsXhmTsw
Maybe Ken Ham can offer him a new job?
If you want the real story behind Noah’s Ark I recommend ‘Boating for Beginners’ by Jeanette Winterson. Here’s the Amazon review:
Noah is a relatively ordinary man. He’s a hard worker (he owns the thriving little pleasure boat company, Boating for Beginners), is slightly overweight and has a heart condition. In fact, apart from a bizarre antipathy towards frozen food, particularly Black Forest Gateau, he is Mr. Bog Standard. That doesn’t stop him from recognising a good thing when he sees it though. So when he accidentally creates God “out of a piece of gateau and a giant electric toaster”, he realises he’s onto a winner. Within weeks, he’s a cult figure, writes extravagant bestsellers-“Genesis”, or How I did It and “Exodus” or Your Way Lies There–and has outlawed refrigerators and Black Forest Gateau. When Noah starts to turn his bestseller into a film, God feels left out and decides to liquidate the world. Noah has less than a week to fill his stage set (the ark) with animals and prepare for a flood. There are three women who find out what he’s up to–Desi, Noah’s daughter-in-law; Marlene, a transsexual potter, and Gloria, the thoughtful yet slightly unbalanced girl in charge of rounding up the animals. Gloria is the heroine of Boating for Beginners and it is her story that drives the rather fragmented narrative of this surreal satire. Bursting with ideas, Boating for Beginners rewrites religion and philosophy, while taking a pop at romantic fiction. It is perhaps Jeanette Winterson’s most overlooked work and although not her best–turn to Oranges are Not the Only Fruit or Sexing the Cherry for that–Boating for Beginners is witty, playful and imaginative. –Jane Honey
There is (or was) another creationist theme park started by Ken Hovind in Pensacola called Dinosaur Adventure Land. It closed in 2009 and then reopened in Lenox, Alabama in 2018. The Florida venture was mired with issues right from the start. They failed to get a building permit, and the property was eventually seized.
On a somewhat related topic,I finally found (and read) Ken’s doctoral dissertation – kent-hovind-doctoral-dissertation.pdf. He was awarded a doctorate in christian education in 1991 from Patriot University, a unaccredited diploma mill. It is only 101 pages, and I thought I could get it done in an afternoon, but my blood pressure wouldn’t allow it. It is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, the pages aren’t numbered, there is no tile, and it begins: Hello, my name is Ken Hovind. I am a creations/science evangelist.
It was never published, and Patriot University will not supply copies of the dissertation without Ken’s written permission, but a bit of searching will reveal copies.
A time-sensitive untruth that already accomplished what it was meant to do.
A band of thieves including many of the higher-ups in Kentucky politics took the tax money and split. All the rest is a farce.
@18 petedaguy
Thank Wikileaks for that one.
It was some of their earlier investigative journalism, before Assange hit it big with the Collateral Murder leaks.
There’s a video on YT where someone’s doing the calcs of the logistics of the Ark and it turns out even giving Noah the most generous definition of two of a “kind” he and his poor family would have spent all the time on the ark futilely shoveling shit out of the ship and also the occasional carcass as all the shit shoveling wouldn’t have allowed to feed the animals. Not that they even would have the storage for all the food anyway. Or air to breath thanks to the lack of ventilation. Oh, and the ark would have to be the size of several modern ocean liners when wood doesn’t allow for ships a fraction of that size.
I don’t think the Ham-burglar’s ark park ever went into detail on this.